Charli xcx Versus the Dance Floor

Music’s Brat is back. But did she ever really leave?

Charli xcx’s domination of the dance (and ultimately mainstream) music world during Summer 2024 will end up as an AP U.S. History DBQ one day. Its cultural and political importance has been repeatedly reported, by everyone from major musical publications like Rolling Stone to her adoring Angels across social media, since Brat’s inception. Nearly two years later, and she’s still the Number 1 Angel on the music world’s lips.

Which is why her declared “reemergence” feels odd. She hasn’t gone anywhere.

Sure, she took fans behind the fictional scenes of her SWEAT and Brat tours via her mockumentary The Moment (2026,) directed by Aidan Zamiri. She played a hyperbolized, manic version of herself, struggling to decide whether to allow Alexander Skarsgard, who plays a White South African filmmaker named Johannes, to creatively direct her tour, or to recycle her old reliable, creative confidante, Celeste, played by Hailey Benton Gates. Watching the thing is a bit of a bile-green fever dream, especially if you had attended one of Brat’s many tour dates. It’s plenty of fun, though.

Then, she got gay and sort of sabbatical-ed in Poland while filming Erupcja (2026,) an upcoming indie romance directed by Pete Ohs. Charli plays Bethany, who, while stranded in Warsaw, reconnects with an old friend, Nel, and “a volcano erupts.”

All this to say, movie stardom can hardly be considered hiding from the limelight. Though Charli has clearly compartmentalized it separately from her musicianship. And Wuthering Heights (the original album she composed for the 2026 film, directed by Emerald Fennel) aside, she is on the cusp of finishing her proper Brat-followup, nicknamed “xcx8” as she teased it throughout her recent interview with Vogue UK.

Interviewer Laura Snapes reports a new lyric from “xcx8” about the state of the scene Charli’s dedicated over a decade of her life to: “I think the dance floor is dead.” Since the piece dropped last week, many musicians from the dance and electronic music genres have dropped their two cents on her take.

Your least favorite white boy’s favorite white boy, John Summit, took to Instagram stories to cutely comment on Charli’s lyric, “Maybe ur pop music dance floor is dead but ours isn’t babe.” Talk about bratty. My lack of familiarity with Summit, coupled with his cattiness, led me to search whether or not he is gay. He is not, probably, just emboldened apparently. And though subtle, the addition of the words “pop music” in his response, is absolutely aimed to belittle. It frankly reads as misogynistic, dismissing her origins as a UK warehouse rave mixtape maker and underground electronic artist. Brat employs elements of pop, sure (expertly, I might add,) but is an electronic album at its core. It won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album. Sorry you didn’t make the remix feature list, bro.

Summit’s right about one thing: the two are occupying different dance floors. They may both be blasting bass-boosted tracks, controlling crowds into synced-up head nodding. But where Summit’s frat boy energy draws Greek life-looking attendees, Charli’s Brat takeover brought out facially-pierced Bushwickians, Silver Lake men in their beanies and carabiners and then ALSO Summit’s sorority girls in their Edikted outfits, along with their popped-collared, boat-shoed boyfriends. Brat reached all.

I pray Summit’s songs never come near me.

Dance is, like all genres, broad and not completely qualifiable. It’s a spectrum. The success and Kamala-fication of Brat posits it as the mainstream median. Just left, and a bit more underground of where Charli sits, is Rochelle Jordan, who also had words for the English electronic star.

“It ain’t dead until WE say so,” posted Jordan on X. Jordan’s producer, KLSH, joined in and cited PinkPantheress, Kaytranada, LSDXOXO and more as dance musicians making moves to keep the sound, and floor, alive. “Highly recommend you go to one actually and dance until you pass out from dehydration,” KLSH added. It was here that KLSH lost me, simply since Charli’s party-girl, out-all-night, snow-up-her-nose notoriety has been defended by pretty much any celebrity who’s been lucky enough to spend a night out with her.

In the rest of the Vogue piece, it is clear that this stance from Charli is a personal one. These seven words are but one lyric from an unreleased song; She goes on about the mental and physical tolls touring Brat took on her. How the dancefloor, for her, became a bit of a nightmare despite the joy and energy it brought to fans around the globe. Charli’s dance floor had to die, or at least go dormant. She famously documented this in both the remix album for Brat and the aforementioned mockumentary, The Moment.

But Jordan and KLSH have a point. There is a strong sect of artists pushing the envelope of electronic, how it sounds and what it looks like in the world. It’s a genre with a massive, transgressive history, one that Charli herself has credited for her own success and continues to defend within the Vogue article.

Anyone in their right music-nerd mind knows that the dance floor is not dead. I’ll be the first to say, I’m still “Bumpin’ that” Brat and its remixes heavily. And electronic acts like Jordan, Jane Remover, PinkPantheress, Frost Children and Kaytranada are turning up and turning out crowds as a result.

Charli xcx is not the end all be all opinion on dance and electronic. She doesn’t get to say when or who it dies with. She does, however, have major stakes in the game and spent a long time earning them. Her words about her own art should be read in that context.

If anything, the reaction to those seven words speak more to Charli as one of many (albeit trollish) arbiters of the dance floor, a position critics have tried to take from her.

So while we wait for “xcx8,” we should give Charlotte a bit of grace. Brat, and its impact, was a whirlwind. Inevitably, its aftermath would be, too. Take to the dance floor if you want to, abstain alongside Charli if you don’t. Maybe seek some new-to-you electronic while Charli takes time away. You’ll probably glean something great, so long as it's not Mr. Summit you turn to. No shade. I hold space for most things, but white dude DJs are a bit much for this transsexual brat.

Image via Getty